The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

an untold amount of wisdom was lost to the ages,5 and there was little incentive to record more of it to the page.

The number of books being produced grew exponentially, increasing by about thirty times in the first century after the printing press was

Our biological instincts are not always very well adapted to the information-rich modern world. Unless we work actively to become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal—or diminishing.

Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t.